Kicking Buffer into a higher gear: Leo is COO
CEO and co-founder @ Buffer
My co-founder Leo has had quite a few different roles throughout the lifetime of Buffer, and he’s had a large impact on lots of different areas.
Until now Leo’s title has been CMO, however he’s working in the trenches of business, on marketing with Belle, as well as doing BD and also admin tasks (like organizing the retreat!). Looking backwards, his real strength has always been in getting things done and moving things forward, regardless of which area of Buffer.
We’ve talked together recently about what would be the most appropriate role in the longer-term for Leo to take within Buffer, and it suddenly became clear. He’ll have the most impact not by focusing on a single area, but by touching all areas to keep us moving at a fast pace.
Leo already recently helped me to develop a structure of regular sync ups with everyone to move Product at a faster pace, and it has worked very well. As another example, he might help Carolyn with figuring out how we can hit the numbers we want in support.
Thinking about it more, Leo and I realized that this is really a COO role that we are envisaging for him. He can work more on the tactical day-to-day tasks and I and others can be a little more freed to think strategically and higher level.
So, starting immediately Leo will now take the role of COO of Buffer. His key focus will be to kick Buffer into a higher gear. As part of this adjustment, you can either reach out to him or he’ll likely be in touch more with all of you too.
Putting this differently:
- My role as CEO is to make sure the train is going in the right direction
- Leo’s role as COO is to ensure the train is on time
The other reason that we’re thinking this makes perfect sense right now, is that we’ve been lucky to reach the stage with Buffer where a lot of things have become clear. We know where we need to go in the coming months and year (growing into a true SaaS product for social media publishing) and a key thing now is simply to execute on this vision.
I’m really excited about this adjustment, even with just a week in his new role Leo has made a big difference as COO.
Let me know if you have any questions about it or if I can explain anything further.
Try Buffer for free
140,000+ small businesses like yours use Buffer to build their brand on social media every month
Get started nowRelated Articles
Nine years ago, we decided to launch a new free product alongside Buffer. We called it Pablo, and it was a huge hit in our community. Within just seven months of its launch, half a million photos were created using Pablo. Similarly, we had the initial ideas for Stories Creator and Remix many years ago now. All three of these tools have been an important part of Buffer’s story. They’ve taught us lessons and helped us connect with a wider audience. In Pablo’s case, the idea for this tool happene
If you use Buffer, you might have experienced us having more downtime than usual recently. We want to start with an apology for not sharing more transparently along the way what’s been happening. We’ve been caught up in the work and haven’t invested enough in communicating with our community, and we’re so sorry about this misstep. We know some of our customers have had a frustrating time using Buffer recently and we need to do better by you. This past August and September were the months we’ve
As part of our commitment to transparency and building in public, Buffer engineer Joe Birch shares how we’re doing this for our own GraphQL API via the use of GitHub Actions.
